3 Reasons Why People Stay In Sales

The amount of turnover in a sales career is enormous, and for various reasons, which I'll discuss in next week's blog. But given than certain industries lose up to 90% of their sales people in the first year of employment should tell you that something is terribly amiss.

However, there are those people who stay in sales and are successful. They are a different breed altogether. Entrepreneurial and driven, they manage to hold out for the next sale. What makes these people tick and what keeps them moving forward? Here are a few possibilities.

1. It's like a game for them. When I got my first real sales job, video games were just getting popular. Our manager told us that we should compete against ourselves and beat our personal "high score". As a decent video game player I was intrigued by this logic.  My forte was a game called Crazy Climber, wherein you helped a guy scale buildings while avoiding things like flower pots and bird crap, and I wanted to beat my personal best score. I also noticed that former athletes were better at sales than others, and I assume it was because of an innate competitive streak. 
2. Income can be limitless. As I mention in my book, when I had a job with a salary, there were days when I was overly productive. On those days I made the same amount of income as I did on the unproductive days. If you're working a commissioned job, you can be productive and rewarded for your effort. On the flip side, the unproductive days will get you little to nothing. The secret is to success is to begin having less unproductive days and more productive days. Sounds logical, but it's can be difficult if you don't have a good system in place (see the previous post). 
3. There's an entrepreneurial spirit. There are those of us who sell insurance, real estate or another product who are basically self-employed. For instance, I am a completely independent sales rep and offer many carriers through my agency. As such, I work when I want, set my own schedule, decide which products are best for my clients, and so on. And I choose which market I'd like to focus on, like small business owners, while others may want to work within another market, like single moms or millennials. My years in retail showed me that you have to deal with everyone who walked through the door, including drunks, jerks and belligerent idiots. I resolved that if I had the opportunity, I would make sure that my clients would be the people I wanted to work with, not required to work with. Those kinds of decisions are what makes "owning your own business" awesome. 

Not sure if you want to stay in sales or even go into sales as a career? It all comes down to one thing, which is "can you sell yourself?"

Chris Castanes is a speaker and president of Surf Financial Brokers.